TODAY: In 1876, a review of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (published by Chatto & Windus in London) appears in a British magazine, six months before the illustrated edition is published in the United States.
- Annie Proulx on one of her favorite short stories, William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid.” | Lit Hub
- “J. Edgar Hoover concluded that Ernest had been an impassioned author with a grand imagination, not a traitor to his country.” The story of Ernest Hemingway’s WWII-era Navy reconnaissance mission to Cuba. | Lit Hub
- “The ‘me’ our corporate system is currently producing is not worthy of any woman’s desire.” Johanna Berkman looks at toxic corporate culture in contemporary fiction. | Lit Hub
- “I created a woman who is angry and afraid, and who uses her fury and fear as fuel for terrible behavior.” Rachel DeWoskin on the literary and political value of rage. | Lit Hub
- “There’s bones in them hills!” On the Wild West of dinosaur fossil hunting. | Lit Hub
- Jonas Hassen Khemiri on surviving Sweden’s polarized political reality. | Lit Hub
- Can’t decide what to read on your summer vacation? Let the Best Reviewed Books of 2019 (So Far) be your guide. | Book Marks
- This week in Shhh…Secrets of the Librarians: Jon Michaud on the radical idea of the public library. | Book Marks
- Tim Mason on the real-life detectives who inspired Charles Dickens (and occasionally allowed him to tag along for their patrols). | CrimeReads
- Read an excerpt from E. Jean Carroll’s What Do We Need Men For?, in which she details her sexual assault by a hideous man who is now the president. | The Cut
- Andrew Weissmann is officially the first prosecutor on Mueller’s investigatory team to get a book deal. | The New York Times
- Why are prisons banning books that teach programming? | VICE
- “For many of us in diaspora, losing Binyavanga Wainaina felt like we were left with one less heartbeat in our chest.” Tavia N’yongo remembers Binyananga Wainaina, who died in May. | N+1
- On the musical and narrative allure of crossword puzzles, and the challenge of “building momentum and settling into the satisfying intellectual cycle of clue and solve, clue and solve.” | The New Yorker
- After Arsenal Pulp Press, a Vancouver-based indie publisher, won three of this year’s Lambda Literary Awards, can Canada’s queer writing community finally gain widespread recognition? | Our Windsor
- “The prose lineage she belongs to is that of open eyes, all scene, one where human connection is tacit.” Italo Calvino on Natalia Ginzburg, “the last woman on earth.” | The Paris Review
Also on Lit Hub: Two poems by Albert Goldbarth • On the violent crime that tells the story of U.S.-Japan relations in Okinawa • Read “Polyptych,” a story by Ben Greenman from the current issue of ZYZZYVA.
